"The Woman with the Movie Camera": Talk by Lilya Kaganovsky

Lilya Kaganovsky will continue her inquiry into the question of a "Soviet women’s cinema" with this presentation on the cinematography of Margarita Pilikhina, the camerawoman on Marlen Khutsiev’s Thaw-era classic film Lenin’s Guard/ I Am Twenty (Zastava Il’icha / Mne dvadtsat’ let). Kaganovsky looks at Pilikhina's work on the film as part of the new wave of Soviet cinema in the 1960s, but also in the context of her other, conventionally Socialist Realist films. This talk will take into consideration other Soviet female cinematographers-- including Tamara Lobova and Marina Goldvoskaya, as well as Iana Sekste, who in 2013 played the role of a camerawoman in Valery Todorovsky’s The Thaw (Ottepel’) --in the broader context of Western feminist film theory and the history of women’s participation in the cinema industries in Hollywood and beyond.

Lilya Kaganovsky is a professor of Slavic, comparative literature, and media & cinema studies, and the director of the Program in Comparative & World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include How the Soviet Man was Unmade, the edited volumes Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s and Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema as well as articles on Soviet and post-Soviet cinema. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema and regularly contributes film reviews to the online cinema journal KinoKultura. Her most recent book on Soviet cinema’s transition to sound, The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1928-1935, was published by Indiana University Press in spring 2018.